Go backpacking?

Yes, you should! The reasons are simple, and plenty. When you travel, you'll see great new places, meet lots of new cool people, taste new food, experience new things and encounter different cultures. To bring up the cliché, travelling really 'broadens your horizon'. A warning though: backpacking is addictive! Once you start travelling, you'll no doubt get infected with the 'travel virus' too, as so many have experienced.

A great place to see: the Giza plateau in Egypt.

And besides the broadening of the horizon thing, you're guaranteed to have loads of fun! You'll meet strange and inspiring people, end up in bizarre towns, see wonders of the world, all of which make great stories to tell later. On the road you're away from every routine, you live an adventurous life and experience complete freedom. And wherever you go, you'll find other travellers almost anywhere. Varying from the rich tourist who sleeps in luxury hotels, complains about everything, hops from sight to sight in an air-conditioned tourist bus and sees all highlights only through the lense of a camera, until the real globetrotter who has been underway for years and has seen and experienced an unnameable amount. The list of why to go backpacking is gigantic. Answer this: why NOT go backpacking? There's a huge world out there, ready to be explored!

This website is mostly meant for the future traveller without a lot of money who has taken up the plan to do some world exploring. This is an introduction on backpacking to show that hitting the road really isn't as hard as it might seem, and to help you prepare optimally for your trip. Special attention is paid to low budget travelling. Many people agree that low budget backpacking is one of the most fun ways to travel. You'll meet the most fun people, learn the local culture a lot better, and will only have to spend a relatively small amount of money, which naturally means that you can stay on the road longer!

Definitions of backpacking

Wondering what backpacking really is? Here's a few cool definitions.

Backpacking is low-budget, independent, see-the-world, off-the-beaten-track travelling. Averse to lugging luggage and to the bland, packaged nature of the commercial tour, backpackers prize the mobility that their packs give them, and would never trade their pack for a suitcase, no matter how many wheels it had. (Source: Open Directory)

Backpacking is a subculture of generally youthful travellers exploring the planet on a limited budget. They refer to themselves as backpackers because they can be roughly defined as travellers that travel with a rucksack (a large backpack) instead of a suitcase. They may go hiking and camping, backpacking in the other sense, but they more often explore more urban settings. United in having slim wallets as well as a passion for the exotic, they seek out low-cost options such as sharing lifts, standby flights (or if the backpacking trip is circumglobal, a relatively cheap round-the-world air ticket which permits numerous stops), youth hostels, free hospitality services and buying food at supermarkets abroad instead of going to restaurants. They often collect in beautiful places with low costs of living such as Goa (India), Essaouira (Morocco), or Thailand. (Source: Wikipedia)